setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[Xah Lee]

just bought a PC and installed Lennart's EmacsW32, which is really
fantastic.

how to set the spell checking up though? i.e. ispell-word or flyspell-
buffer.

when i run ispell-word, it gives:
“apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell”.

i read most emacsW32 doc and emacswiki, but didn't seems to find the
answer.

Do i need to set a path to cygwin ispell or something? (i have aspell
installed in cygwin, but not ispell yet)

Thanks.

  Xah
\xAD\xF4 http://xahlee.org/

Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[B. T. Raven]

Xah Lee wrote:
> just bought a PC and installed Lennart's EmacsW32, which is really
> fantastic.
> 
> how to set the spell checking up though? i.e. ispell-word or flyspell-
> buffer.
> 
> when i run ispell-word, it gives:
> “apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell”.
> 
> i read most emacsW32 doc and emacswiki, but didn't seems to find the
> answer.
> 
> Do i need to set a path to cygwin ispell or something? (i have aspell
> installed in cygwin, but not ispell yet)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 

Lennart's Emacs is patched native w32 build I think. You might need 
aspell from here:

http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/aspell/

I don't know whether you also need w32 kde or not or even what that 
might mean. If you learn anything, let me know how you use ispell-aspell 
for other languages than English. The relevant line from ispell.el is:

(defcustom ispell-program-name
   (or (locate-file "aspell" exec-path exec-suffixes 'file-executable-p)
       "ispell")
   "Program invoked by \\[ispell-word] and \\[ispell-region] commands."
   :type 'string
   :group 'ispell)

but most of the paths in this file refer to glunix directory structure 
so I don't know how it applies to w32. Maybe if you had Lennart's Emacs 
running and also had a cygwin bash shell process, Emacs might find your 
aspell program.

Ed

Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[Jason Rumney]

On May 31, 12:16 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:

> Lennart's Emacs is patched native w32 build I think. You might need
> aspell from here:
>
> http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/aspell/
>
> I don't know whether you also need w32 kde or not or even what that
> might mean.

You don't need KDE to use aspell. If you want to be sure that there
are no KDE dependencies, you can also download aspell from http://aspell.net/win32/

> but most of the paths in this file refer to glunix directory structure

If aspell.exe is in your PATH, Emacs will find it. But on Windows, it
is conventional for installers to not put executables in the PATH, or
even to set PATH to include the directory they install to.
Unfortunately many installers for ports of GNU tools also follow this
convention, even though GNU tools are designed to collaborate
together, rather than be used as a monolithic application, so it may
be necessary to customize ispell-program to the full path of
aspell.exe.

Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[B. T. Raven]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> On May 31, 12:16 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> 
>> Lennart's Emacs is patched native w32 build I think. You might need
>> aspell from here:
>>
>> http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/aspell/
>>
>> I don't know whether you also need w32 kde or not or even what that
>> might mean.
> 
> You don't need KDE to use aspell. If you want to be sure that there
> are no KDE dependencies, you can also download aspell from http://aspell.net/win32/

Thanks, Jason. I did download that one first (1.19 meg 
Aspell-0-50-3-3-Setup.exe) but then found the other 0.60 version (aspell 
binary only). Can I install the 0.50 and then copy the newer file(s) on 
top of them? All my GnuWin32 tools are in a flat directory C:\gnu and 
this is included in my PATH, but after winnt/system32. Name collisions 
like sort, ftp, etc. will try to run the MS versions first.

> 
>> but most of the paths in this file refer to glunix directory structure
> 
> If aspell.exe is in your PATH, Emacs will find it. But on Windows, it
> is conventional for installers to not put executables in the PATH, or
> even to set PATH to include the directory they install to.
> Unfortunately many installers for ports of GNU tools also follow this
> convention, even though GNU tools are designed to collaborate
> together, rather than be used as a monolithic application, so it may
> be necessary to customize ispell-program to the full path of
> aspell.exe.

So is this on the right track then:

(defcustom ispell-program-name
   (or "C:/gnu/aspell"
       "ispell")
;; anyway (or "this" "that") returns "this" without error in scratch
;; but the function in context wouldn't work in general if aspell 
weren't there.
;; maybe this is a better guess:

(or (locate-file "c:/gnu/aspell" exec-path exec-suffixes 'file-executable-p)
       "ispell")

"Program invoked by \\[ispell-word] and \\[ispell-region] commands."
   :type 'string
   :group 'ispell)

Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[Jason Rumney]

On Jun 1, 12:42 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Jason Rumney wrote:
> > On May 31, 12:16 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
>
> >> Lennart's Emacs is patched native w32 build I think. You might need
> >> aspell from here:
>
> >>http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/aspell/
>
> >> I don't know whether you also need w32 kde or not or even what that
> >> might mean.
>
> > You don't need KDE to use aspell. If you want to be sure that there
> > are no KDE dependencies, you can also download aspell fromhttp://aspell.net/win32/
>
> Thanks, Jason. I did download that one first (1.19 meg
> Aspell-0-50-3-3-Setup.exe) but then found the other 0.60 version (aspell
> binary only). Can I install the 0.50 and then copy the newer file(s) on
> top of them? All my GnuWin32 tools are in a flat directory C:\gnu and
> this is included in my PATH, but after winnt/system32. Name collisions
> like sort, ftp, etc. will try to run the MS versions first.
>
>
>
> >> but most of the paths in this file refer to glunix directory structure
>
> > If aspell.exe is in your PATH, Emacs will find it. But on Windows, it
> > is conventional for installers to not put executables in the PATH, or
> > even to set PATH to include the directory they install to.
> > Unfortunately many installers for ports of GNU tools also follow this
> > convention, even though GNU tools are designed to collaborate
> > together, rather than be used as a monolithic application, so it may
> > be necessary to customize ispell-program to the full path of
> > aspell.exe.
>
> So is this on the right track then:
>
> (defcustom ispell-program-name

ispell-program-name is already defined in ispell.el. You probably want
to use setq here.

>    (or "C:/gnu/aspell"
>        "ispell")

The above is the same as "C:/gnu/aspell".

> (or (locate-file "c:/gnu/aspell" exec-path exec-suffixes 'file-executable-p)
>        "ispell")

Since you're supplying the full path, you don't really need to locate-
file unless you are unsure which of exec-suffixes applies.

(file-executable-p "c:/gnu/aspell.exe")

Should be enough if you find the behaviour of falling back on "ispell"
useful when aspell does not exist in that location.

Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[Xah Lee]

On May 30, 7:48 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> just bought a PC and installed Lennart's EmacsW32, which is really
> fantastic.
>
> how to set the spell checking up though? i.e. ispell-word or flyspell-
> buffer.
>
> when i run ispell-word, it gives:
> “apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell”.

Thanks for all the replies. Lennart gave me the answer. Basically, i
need to pull the menu “Options > Customize EmacsW32”. It's right there
where u can specify the ispell/aspell path.

I thought that menu is the same as invoking “M-x customize-group Enter
emacsW32”, but actually not. Worthy of note for those installing
emacsW32.

  Xah
\xAD\xF4 http://xahlee.org/